Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Geek Speak => Topic started by: ImTr0uble on 03/04/2008 14:26:54
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what is the best graphics card and where am i able to get it and how much money would u think it is
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Before replacing the card make sure you know what type the pc accepts. Most older pc's used a pci or AGP port, newer pc's use a pci-e port so its important to get the correct type or it wont fit. If its a laptop then you are very restricted in choice.
I would recommend the Nvidia Gforce cards for games, the drivers are solid and you can also use them under LInux (which I use). The ATI cards can cause problems as the drivers are not as good.
The Gforce 6500 series are a bit old and can be got fairy cheap (relative) and will play most games, games that are a few years old run well.
The newer cards 8000> will play most of the newer games.
I have a Gforce 8500 with 1gb ddr2 memory on board and it runs the games I have well, cost me around £50 ($100) and I got it from Maplin electronics UK.
That's a point, you don't mention your location so do an online search first.
Hers one to get you started:
http://internetgames.about.com/od/hardware/tp/tpvideocards.htm
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It depends on what you really need. In most things in computing, a good rule of thumb is if you don't need it, don't use it.
Modern graphics cards, aside from being fairly expensive (although that depends on your budget as to what is meant by expensive - but you can easily spend over £300 on a graphics card), they are also major consumers of power (a high end graphics card not consumes as much, if not more, power than the processor), and thus also generates a lot of heat, and a fair amount of noise (mostly for the cooling fans to keep them cool).
But, if after having said that, you decide that the purpose you do desire to put your PC to actually does require the crème de la crème of graphics cards, then you can even buy two, and configure them to run together in your PC as an SLI pair.
If it is money no object, then you can get a PNY Quadro FX5600 1.5GB PCI-E 16x (http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4MP6&CategorySelectedId=11137&PageMode=1&NavigationKey=11137,43990000) SLI card for a mere £1,859.98.
At the other extreme, you can get a low end graphics card for under £30 (and save on your electricity bills).
Oh, and if you are looking at high end cards, you not only need to make sure your PC's motherboard will accept the card (particularly if you are looking at SLI or CrossFire cards - although the latter I think is now mostly defunct), but also have to make sure your power supply on your PC is capable of delivering the power (I have heard of people driving their PC's with PSUs of between 500W and 1KW for ultra high end graphics).